What’s up in Iran?

Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, announced today that he had seen no convincing evidence that foreign powers were involved in the anti-government demonstrations following the June election. This is rather extraordinary for two reasons.

First, he has said this in the midst of trials alleging that protesters were part of a foreign — US and British inspired — plot against the Iranian regime. So, Khamenei’s statement — and he is after all the SUPREME LEADER — undermines the premise of many of the trials and challenges the many confessions by demonstrators and prominent figures who have been arrested. It is widely believed in the west that these confessions were coerced. We have to conclude that Khamenei has essentially admitted the truth behind that belief.

But there is a second, equally extraordinary feature to this declaration. President Obama allegedly has offered to take a tougher stance toward Iran if Netanyahu’s government in Israel will go along with preventing more settlements. Of course we do not know what back channel conversations are taking place between US and Iranian leaders and we don’t know whether the reported “get tough” offer by Obama has actually been made. Still, we can see in Khamenei’s declaration a  signal that he wants to lower the temperature and perhaps get  on track to come to a negotiated resolution of the outstanding issues between the US and Iran, most notably, of course, the nuclear issue.

Maybe I am drinking my own whiskey but this looks very promising to me. Back in February in my TED talk I predicted that Khamenei’s power was declining and I also predicted that the Iranian leadership would strike a deal with the US in which they might develop some weapons grade fuel but they would not build a bomb. Khamenei’s statement — coupled with the intensity of the demonstrations in June — is consistent with the projection that his power is on the way down (and he is trying to maneuver to slow or reverse his declining fortunes) and also is consistent with an effort to get negotiations going. Surely he would get some significant boost from reaching an agreement on the nuclear front that does not impede Iran’s demonstration that they have the know-how to build a bomb and that, as they have been claiming all along, that know-how does not mean they want to build a bomb. (Let’s hope that if and when negotiations get underway, if they are not already going full steam ahead, that the Obama foreign policy team will be careful to extract a credible, verifiable commitment from Iran to allow sufficient oversight to ensure they don’t make more than a minimal, research quantity of weapons grade fuel).

Could be a very interesting year before us!